Testing the next two products in my Lush chocolate product bag required some forward planning, but the verdicts are now in. Here we have a romance-inspired massage bar and a fresh chocolate face mask.

The Soft Coeur is advertised as a massage bar for couples. It’s made with honey and cocoa powder, making a chocolate honey centre which you can apparently smooth over the other person (or yourself, if so inclined). They say the experience is quite sticky, though I personally didn’t find it that much different from some of their other massage bars.

Soft Coeur smells very sweet – a candy smell, rather than chocolate smell. It’s quite a rich bar and like all massage bars, needs some warming up before you can see what it does.

Apparently, you’re meant to break it in half and use the brown, chocolatey centre for the massage, as well as the white cocoa butter bit. I must admit I found that quite weird to work with. It smears brown on the skin and your hands in a manner which I didn’t find entirely appealing, although it is perfectly edible and smells lovely.

Supposedly that is actually the point of the bar and it’s meant to be similar to the experience of using actual chocolate or honey on the skin. I guess if you’re into that, you’ll find it quite fun and significantly less messy than the alternative.

The Cupcake was a bit more problematic for me to test, as it’s for oily and/or teenage skin, whereas I have sensitive skin. I did, however, find a friend with the right skin type who also happened to be a fan of everything chocolate.

Here is what she had to say about the experience:

The mask smells amazing the minute you open the jar (Once you’ve worked out that it’s a screw-top and doesn’t just pull off). It’s like lovely thick minty chocolatey gooey mud, which is quite cool on your skin and feels as if it may contain menthol (it doesn’t, though it does contain both peppermint and spearmint oil).

It was very tricky to wash off – I had to sort of scrape it off. It made my face feel really nice and the pores almost invisible, so it obviously works. My face tingled for a while afterwards — probably from the peppermint oil — so this mask would probably be a bit much for sensitive skin types.